Scully looked almost like she’d seen a ghost, and he should know; he’d seen her after she’d seen one. Her fingers flexed on the back of one of her high wooden chairs. “It’s because I haven’t been getting enough zinc.” She swallowed. “Isn’t it.”
When he stepped toward her she kept the chair between them. She could break his heart if she weren’t so busy scaring the shit out of him.
The low, sibilant way she used to take to like a body to water, in the middle of the night, in the flail of some nightmare: Where is my weapon. Did I take enough zinc. And -- Scully, till she sagged with it. Her muscles going long against her bones, which had gone still against his. Scully, alright Scully. Asleep in his arms untense as an exhausted swimmer.
But now she was rigid. And her eyes were so open, he could see straight to the very blue bottom of her confusion, which was something terrible and true.
“No,” she said. “Don’t do that.” One hand went to her mouth and the other to her chest. Like she was going to throw up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. “Oh my god,” she said, all but doubled over with it. “Please don’t do this to me.”
She hadn’t answered the door when he’d knocked, though he’d hardly knocked. The buzz of anonymous highway had been in him, dirt still in his hair, and he’d realized on the walk up to her apartment that he was wearing a rather nice suit, probably Armani.
It was all too strange, even by his generous measure. He’d woken up under a slice of clear blue rectangle in North Carolina that morning. In his gums, it made his teeth ache.
And then there was Scully.
Don’t do this to me, that’s what she’d said when he’d come in the door, too, bolting upright on her couch, scrabbling for her service weapon. Had she been asleep? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. It was, per the gas station calendar as he’d hitched statelines, a Tuesday. Her hair had been a fright. There were bruises under her eyes as purple as any cadaver’s little finger.
He’d thought — what had he thought? What was he supposed to think? She was Scully. The steps were quite simple: If things were strange, he found Scully. Sometimes, yes, it took a moment to travel from point A to point B. Sometimes there were many smaller steps between those two essential ones. But the fact remained that, in ketamine dreams or the throes of self-imposed psychodementia, the buck stopped with Scully. Once he found her, some broader leap toward not-strangeness, or at the very least a better kind of strange, could almost always reliably be made.
Except this was worse, undeniably. Scully cornered across her kitchen where she’d flown after failing to locate her gun. It was not so much that she seemed afraid. The first thing she’d said, before imploring him that she could not take it, had been his name. And she’d said it just like she always had, with a tugging in it, a slur that was like closing a distance. It sounded exactly like the buck still stopped at her front door.
“Please,” she was saying still, but she had stopped looking at him, sobbing to the hard wood and pale tile floor. “I don’t know—”
“Scully,” he said, in a different way, older and more urgent. “It’s me. It is me.”
And damn if her face didn’t snap right up to his again. Yes. The echo and aftershock of recognition. His Scully of the basement office and the connected motel room door. Since forever, his assigned seat-mate, his stalwart, his level best. The dutiful daughter whose eyes had looked like that — Christ, just like that — when her father had died.
Still, she was shaking her head. Her chin in that self-loathing crimp. “I can’t,” she said.
“Yes,” he told her, though he didn’t know what, really. Anything. “Sure you can, Scully. It’s alright.”
Scully took a deep breath. When she tore loose of herself it was with a shudder. The same rent-apart way she'd looked when she recalled burning spaceships with her hands open, or when she’d stepped through the doorway into his room, that first time.
Upon him then, across the room, the dig of her forearm into the flesh of his neck like an incision, like that was how close she wanted to be: to the bone. The chair rattled.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, oh —” He put his arms around her ribs and spine. He put a hand in her hair to hold her and mean it. He said her name one more way, a way that wasn’t worth describing.
Scully cried like to bring down high heaven. She cried like when she’d nearly had her heart torn out on his ratty living room floor. She cried in a way he’d never heard her cry before.
Mulder put his face to her hot neck. When he tried to speak, he didn’t know what there was to say. He stood and shook funeral dirt all over her, his widow, and her bright clean kitchen floors.
